| DIY Home Theater July 2004
 Starting Out
Whether our responsibilities and commitments are to
work or to family, we all need the occasional healthy distraction. Over the past few years
my main distractions have been music and putting together a very nice two-channel stereo
system. I now find myself at something of a dead end: I'm very happy with my hi-fi, and
can't see needing to add to it anytime soon. At this point, any significant upgrade would
require my spending thousands more dollars, and that, to me, seems unwise. I could just
sit back and enjoy my music (which I do), but the problem is, I liked shopping for
stereo equipment, and I liked planning my system, and the upgrade path I took to
get to it.
I began to wonder what might take the place of or augment
my hi-fi obsession. Then it dawned on me -- I could put together a serious home theater! I
have the basic components -- receiver, DVD player, speakers, a TV. Surely I could turn
them into something much better than they are. Then something else dawned on me -- I could
write about my progress toward a sophisticated home theater and share my successes and
defeats, my pride and frustrations as I move through this, for me, undiscovered country.
So, as its title suggests, this column will be about do-it-yourself (DIY) home theater:
everything from building a home-theater room to putting together a home-theater personal
computer (HTPC) to decorating your room like a movie theater.
What you’ll get here is one layperson’s
perspective on organizing and completing home-theater projects on a real-world budget.
Most people have many responsibilities and hobbies that they need to parcel out their
income among. This column is therefore not for the home-theater obsessed (although
they might learn a thing or two from it), who are able and willing to throw tons of cash
at building a theater. Rather, it’s for those who, over a few months’ time, want
to enjoy the building process and pride that comes along with saying, "I built
this!"
Build a room or make over a current one
The most important decision to make when you’ve
decided to have a home theater is where to put it. There are three alternatives that most
people choose among: let your home theater share the living room, put it in a dedicated
pre-existing room, or build a room for it.
The easiest and cheapest route is to integrate a
home-theater system into your living or family room. If you're like lots of people, you
already have a television in the room; if you stick with satellite speakers and an
attractive subwoofer, you'll be able to have a basic multichannel home-theater system in
no time. But while it would certainly be convenient, this doesn't hold much appeal for me,
for several reasons.
My living room isn't laid out in a way conducive to adding
all the speakers necessary for a home theater. More important, I have no TV in my living
room, which functions as my main listening room. So while there’s no lack of
electronics, they’re all dedicated to audio-only playback -- it’s a no-video
zone.
Other factors make such a room a less than ideal setup for
a home theater. First, if other people live with you and the living room is a place for
everyone to relax in, then it’s unlikely to be able to be as much of a movie theater
as you'd probably like. Imagine you want to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark or The
Matrix or another adventure movie, but your wife is having a Tupperware party.
Second, unless you’re truly committed, you probably
don't want your living room decorated like a movie theater. I like old movie posters for
my favorite films, but I don't want them to be the main decorations of my living room
(that honor is reserved for photos of jazz greats).
Third, most living rooms tend to have lots of windows,
and/or open into other rooms. The windows will be no good for being able to keep the room
as dark as a theater, and will be too reflective of sound. Being open to other rooms will
mean that the sound is likely to escape and bother other people in the house and, again,
isn't so great for the sound in the theater itself.
Dedicating one room to home theater will avoid many of
these drawbacks. You can cover the windows with blackout material without limiting the
room’s suitability for other uses. Paint the walls an appropriate color, decorate
with theater accessories, haul in some theater seats, and you’re good to go. You can
even go all out and install in-wall speaker wires, and maybe build an equipment cabinet or
closet that will make the room look even better.
But few of us have an extra room just waiting to be
transformed into a home theater. Currently, an unused bedroom in my house serves this
purpose, but I'm not completely satisfied with the results. First, it’s a small room
made worse by the fact that the ceiling slopes on both sides (it’s on the third, top
floor of my home) -- if you aren't careful, you can bump your head when you stand up.
Second, the room still functions as a guest bedroom at times, which limits my ability to
make it completely home-theater-like (no theater seats for me), and means that when we
have company, I'm at their mercy when it comes to television and movie viewing. Also, the
room is directly above another, currently empty, bedroom on the floor below. That room may
soon be a baby's bedroom, and I'm not sure the baby will be forgiving about the subwoofer
shaking its ceiling.
Finally, there's the most expensive, but perhaps most fun,
option: build a room for your home theater. Adding a room onto your home simply for a
theater may be beyond the means or desires of most, but there are other options. If you
have an unused garage, you could build some walls and convert it to a theater. The choice
most commonly made is to build a theater in the basement. If you have an unfinished or
partially finished basement, you probably have the space needed for a home theater. Of
course, this puts the amount of work involved over the top. You could hire a contractor,
but that will bring the fun factor down to zero. For this option, you'll need to work up a
plan, a budget, get the permits, and figure out how to build and wire some walls.
Depending on how much time you have, this could take months. This choice produces the most
frustration, but also the greatest sense of accomplishment when completed. You'll have a
room dedicated to watching movies, decorated in any way you want, wired for a multichannel
system, with the largest screen you can devise, and far away from where it could bother
other members of the household.
HTPCs
Once you’ve decided on your room requirements, you can
start thinking about what kind of equipment to put into it. Most home theaters use
components dedicated to specific applications; e.g., DVD players, video scalers, TiVo or
ReplayTV. The rise of computer technology and the decline of computer prices makes it
possible to construct a PC dedicated to do much of the work that people generally use
consumer-electronics components for. Such PCs are fantastic for multiroom systems, and
have an almost unlimited number of uses. You can store your movies on a hard drive for
distribution throughout your house, send music to different rooms, set up the system to
record your favorite television shows, control the resolution of your display device, and
just about anything else you could want. Unlike separate components, PCs are incredibly
flexible; if there’s something you want to do, you'll probably, with a little
ingenuity, be able to figure out how to do it.
After building a home theater, I’ll look at when an
HTPC makes sense for a user, then design one that meets the requirements decided on.
But wait, there’s more
While the construction of a home theater and HTPC will form
the backbone of this column, they aren’t the only things I’ll be discussing.
After all, once a home theater is built, you’ll need to know how to build a screen
and decorate the room. If you remember or have seen pictures of old theaters, you know
that many were decorated in an art-deco style that has long since been replaced by bland,
utilitarian designs. Because I want an old-school design for my home theater, I’ll be
discussing how to decorate it, and how and where to find the cool accessories that will at
least remind me of the great movie palaces of the past. I’ll also look at how video
and audio systems can be calibrated to get the best out of your system and theater.
Conclusion
I hope you’ll join me on this journey into DIY home
theater. If you’re contemplating such a project, I hope to give you some support as
you monitor my successes and frustrations as I make my way toward my goal. But before we
can even get started, we’ll need to figure out what we can afford. In the next
installment, I’ll work up a budget for a simple remodeling project that will result
in a modest home theater.
...Eric Hetherington
erich@hometheatersound.com
|
